Open Up the Research Gate : Networking and Researching Communities on Academic Social Network Sites

Academic social network sites (SNS) have gained enormous ground over the last years. The biggest services ResearchGate, Mendeley and Academia.edu all have much more than 1 million members and the numbers are rapidly increasing. However, only limited research has been carried out on social media in science (Nentwich & König, 2012). Although a vivid community creates and implements alternative measures of scientific impact with social media data (Altmetrics; Priem & Hemminger, 2011), little use has been made of academic SNS to analyze scientific communities.
Our aim is twofold: Firstly, we outline the state of research on and with scientific SNS. We show how such data is useful both to enhance our knowledge in the sociology of science and for practical purposes. Secondly, we present preliminary results of a research project with ResearchGate. Drawing on data from this SNS we describe the scholarly network of the Business Innovation area of the University of St. Gallen.